A love story in the city of dreams

Exploring some of his favourite themes - amnesia / memory; roads / travelling and alter egos / changing identities, Mulholland Drive is fortunately not simply a rerun on the Lost Highway.
Its origin as a product for television turns out to be - mostly - a positive factor here, as the film stays close to its protagonists. The performances of Laura Elena Harring, Naomi Watts and Justin Theroux are the heart of this film, with the events loosely attached to them.
If anything, Mulholland Drive is close to Twin Peaks, both the series and the feature film, taking much time to create spheres and moods around the characters without paying much attention to a tight narrative or evoking tension. Which doesn`t mean that the clues and hints given add up to something that will make perfect sense, it´s just that one could enter an endless loop of the film at any and leave if you think you´ve gotten enough of it.
Mulholland Drive is the complete opposite of a "thriller", so don`t expect a climax or a solution.

Scheduled for fall 1999 TV airing, the 'Mulholland Drive'-series was dropped by ABC after finishing the pilot. The project dates back to 1992, originally intended to be a spin-off ot Twin Peaks, co-written by David Lynch and Bob Engels.
It was released theatrically with a new ending, financed by Canal+ this year.
Mulholland premiered at this year´s Cannes festival in May, and won the prize for best director (shared with another brilliant film The Coens` The Man Who Wasn`t There).
There are - at least - three different versions of the movie:
The 90 minutes ABC pilot, circulating on bootlegg tapes, cut down from an original running time of 120 minutes, the version that Lynch had orginally produced for television airing. Finally, there`s the theatrical version with a running time of about 145 minutes.
The 90 minutes version ends with breaking into the apartment and finding the corpse. It is in a few ways much tighter and darker than the theatrical version, mostly due to the editing and a use of music that´s closer to the events.

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